If you’ve previously visited this blog of mine before, you’ll notice it’s totally different. I decided to do this is because of three main reasons.
My older blog felt dated, despite only being live for 6 months.
Perhaps it was the kind of theme I chosen, or the way I decided to structure blog posts and layouts. I designed it in a fashion that I’ll be posting often enough to warrant multiple categories, rather than just having blog posts and articles. I even had a cooking category 1. Not realizing that life will come in the way that I won’t be able to write often enough. Looking back, the blog also felt like it had too much unecessary elements to it, to the point that it led to many other issues I was unhappy with.
It’s hard to maintain an theme I ported over myself over the long run.
The original theme was pure HTML, CSS and JS, without any Jekyll or markdown design consideration. As a learning exercise for myself, I decided to break up the theme and
start porting the entire theme over, breaking up the files and CSS. Well it started out pretty nice. It quickly became very unwieldy with dependencies and manual
tasks all over the place. I knew I wasn’t a designer to begin with, so I took it upon myself to just port someone else’s theme. That was great until I later
started running into issues like having to manually figure out <h1> tags and styling, along with forced <hr> or <br> line breaks. Since attempting to change
the stylesheets would break the designs elsewhere. There was some issue with responsive images that just wouldn’t center, or code snippets looking weird on mobile.
6 months in when I decided to work on my blog again I realized all these shortcomings would not stick for the long run. It detracted from the purpose of Markdown, content first, design later.
The previous blog didn’t portray what I wanted it to.
After revisiting my previous blog after a semester of 5 CSci subjects (seriously it does things to you), and from the opinions and feedbacks of friends whom opinions matter to me, I realized the blog wasn’t what I wanted to portray. It wasn’t professional enough, it wasn’t content first, it seemed a little too gimmicky, with too much fluff. No one does cooking in a technical blog, and it felt like it was displaying myself more than the content itself too much. It’s definitely a personal blog, but the best blogs I’ve seen focus on what the content has to offer, everything else being complementary. This should be a professional yet somewhat personal avenue for me, and this new revamp accomplishes that 2.
However, since I spent a lot of time, effort, and as they say, love into making that previous blog, porting a theme over making it a one-of-a-kind Jekyll theme, it’s archived over at legacy.leewc.com.
Also, credits to Michael Rose for this elegant, minimal theme.
Regarding DNS and subdomains
I did have an hour or so of frustration when I attempted to migrate the old site to legacy.leewc.com and have this repository be my main GitHub pages site. Despite following the tutorials on setting up subdomains on CloudFlare and How GitHub redirects subdomains. My entire website did not resolve immediately, which is funny since deleting old DNS rules took effect within a minute. Turns out all I had to do was wait for an hour or two before the resources resolve and the DNS nameservers all update. Something to keep in mind in the future. Can’t blame anyone though, Github did mention it would take up to a day to update. I was just too eager to see it all go live.
Till then, I hope I get back into writing more, being my last semester as a student.
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also, that cat picture as a site photo was meant as a placeholder but it really did grow on me. ↩